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The Counter-Enlightenment
I
Opposition to the central ideas of the French En­
light­en­ment, and of its allies and disciples in other European
countries, is as old as the movement itself. The proclamation of
the autonomy of reason and the methods of the natural sciences,
based on observation as the sole reliable method of knowledge,
and the consequent rejection of the authority of revelation,
sacred writings and their accepted interpreters, tradition,
prescription, and every form of non-rational and transcendent
source of knowledge, was naturally opposed by the Churches
and religious thinkers of many persuasions. But such opposition,
largely because of the absence of common ground between them
and the philosophers of the Enlighten­ment, made relatively little
headway, save by stimulating repressive steps against the spreading of ideas regarded as dangerous to the authority of Church or
State. More formidable was the relativist and sceptical tradition
that went back to the ancient world. The central doctrines of
the progressive French thinkers, whatever their disagreements
among themselves, rested on the belief, rooted in the ancient
doctrine of natural law, that human nature was fundamentally
the same in all times and places; that local and historical variations were unimportant compared with the constant central core
in terms of which human beings could be defined as a species,
like animals, or plants, or minerals; that there were universal
human goals; that a logically connected structure of laws and
generalisations susceptible of demonstration and verification
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2 • Against the Current
could be constructed and replace the chaotic amalgam of ignor­
ance, mental laziness, guesswork, superstition, prejudice, dogma,
fantasy, and, above all, the ‘interested error’1 maintained by the
rulers of mankind and largely responsible for the blunders, vices
and misfortunes of humanity.
It was further believed that methods similar to those of
Newtonian physics, which had achieved such triumphs in the
realm of inanimate nature, could be applied with equal success to
the fields of ethics, politics and human relationships in general, in
which little progress had been made; with the corollary that once
this had been effected, it would sweep away irrational and oppressive legal systems and economic policies the replacement of
which by the rule of reason would rescue men from political and
moral injustice and misery and set them on the path of wisdom,
happiness and virtue. Against this, there persisted the doctrine
that went back to the Greek sophists, Protagoras, Antiphon and
Critias, that beliefs involving value-judgements, and the institutions founded upon them, rested not on discoveries of objective
and unalterable natural facts, but on human opinion, which was
variable and differed between different societies and at different
times; that moral and political values, and in particular justice
and social arrangements in general, rested on fluctuating human
convention. This was summed up by the sophist quoted by
Aristotle who declared that whereas fire burned both here and
in Persia, human institutions change under our very eyes. It
seemed to follow that no universal truths, established by scientific ­methods, that is, truths that anyone could verify by the use
of proper methods, anywhere, at any time, could in principle be
established in human affairs.
This tradition reasserted itself strongly in the writings of such
sixteenth-century sceptics as Cornelius Agrippa, Montaigne
and Charron, whose influence is discernible in the sentiments
xlvii/1.
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The Counter-Enlightenment • 3
of thinkers and poets in the Elizabethan and Jacobean age. Such
scepticism came to the aid of those who denied the claims of the
natural sciences or of other universal rational schemas and advocated salvation in pure faith, like the great Protestant reformers
and their followers, and the Jansenist wing of the Roman Church.
The rationalist belief in a single coherent body of logically
­deduced conclusions, arrived at by universally valid principles of
thought and founded upon carefully sifted data of observation or
experiment, was further shaken by sociologically minded thinkers
from Bodin to Montesquieu. These writers, using the evidence of
both history and the new literature of travel and exploration in
newly discovered lands, Asia and the Americas, emphasised the
variety of human customs and especially the influence of dissimilar natural factors, particularly geographical ones, upon the
develop­ment of different human societies, leading to differences
of institutions and outlook, which in their turn generated wide
differences of belief and behaviour. This was powerfully reinforced
by the revolutionary doctrines of David Hume, especially by his
demonstration that no logical links existed between truths of fact
and such a priori truths as those of logic or mathematics, which
tended to weaken or dissolve the hopes of those who, under the
influence of Descartes and his followers, thought that a single
system of knowledge, embracing all provinces and answering all
questions, could be established by unbreakable chains of logical
argument from universally valid axioms, not subject to refutation
or modification by any experience of an empirical kind.
Nevertheless, no matter how deeply relativity about human
values or the interpretation of social, including historical, facts
entered the thought of social thinkers of this type, they too
retained a common core of conviction that the ultimate ends
of all men at all times were, in effect, identical: all men sought
the satisfaction of basic physical and biological needs, such as
food, shelter, security, and also peace, happiness, justice, the
harmonious development of their natural faculties, truth, and,
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4 • Against the Current
somewhat more vaguely, virtue, moral perfection, and what the
Romans had called humanitas. Means might differ in cold and
hot climates, mountainous countries and flat plains, and no
universal formula could fit all cases without Procrustean results,
but the ultimate ends were fundamentally similar. Such influential writers as Voltaire, d’Alembert and Condorcet believed that
the development of the arts and sciences was the most powerful
human weapon in attaining these ends, and the sharpest weapon
in the fight against ignorance, superstition, fanaticism, oppression
and barbarism, which crippled human effort and frustrated men’s
search for truth and rational self-direction. Rousseau and Mably
believed, on the contrary, that the institutions of civilisation were
themselves a major factor in the corruption of men and their
alienation from nature, from simplicity, purity of heart and the life
of natural justice, social equality, and spon­taneous human feeling;
artificial man had imprisoned, enslaved and ­ruined ­natural man.
Nevertheless, despite profound differences of outlook, there was
a wide area of agreement about fundamental points: the reality
of natural law (no longer formulated in the language of orthodox
Catholic or Protestant doctrine), of eternal principles by following which alone men could become wise, happy, virtuous and
free. One set of universal and unalterable principles governed the
world for theists, deists and atheists, for optimists and pessimists,
puritans, primitivists and believers in progress and the richest
fruits of science and culture; these laws governed inanimate and
animate nature, facts and events, means and ends, private life and
public, all societies, epochs and civilisa­tions; it was solely by departing from them that men fell into crime, vice, misery. Thinkers
might differ about what these laws were, or how to discover them,
or who were qualified to expound them; that these laws were
real, and could be known, whether with certainty, or only probability, remained the central dogma of the entire Enlightenment.
It was the attack upon this that constitutes the most formidable
­reaction against this dominant body of belief.
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